Conventionally, recommendations are shown to a viewer at the end of a show (e.g., television show, end of a movie, or end other types of viewable programs). This is usually done to provide the viewer with suggestions of new shows (e.g., from a video-on-demand catalog, from the user's watch list), to allow an operator to promote channels (e.g., suggest shows from a particular channel provider), or simply to improve a viewing experience for the view by providing additional or easy ways to discover more content.
An ideal time to show these recommendations may be during ending credits. Typically, the broadcast or streaming signal includes a trigger that marks a beginning of the ending credits. However, the inclusion of the marker is quite complicated and involves manually marking where the credits begin along with requiring hardware and software to encode this into the broadcast or streaming signal. Additionally, low-level software is required in a receiver device to capture the marker and pass it up from firmware, through middleware, to a user interface. Non-trivial code needs to be developed both at a headend and at multiple levels within the receiver device, which may require hardware changes. As such, some operators do not want to take this approach, and instead, display the recommendations a fixed time before the scheduled end-of-show (e.g., one minute before end-of-show).